The Essence of Innovative Collaboration and Theoretical Evolution of Open Source Software from Cooperation and Competition Perspectives
Open source is the mainstream development and innovation mode of development from the perspective of digital ecology,and it is also an important support for building a digital China.Although some scholars have carried out relevant researches,there are few reviews on open source software itself,especially on its conceptual nature and theoretical evolution.Based on this,this paper will focus on the core issue of"the conceptual nature and theoretical evolution of open source software"and break it down into the following sub-research questions:(1)What is the current research status of existing literature?(2)What is the evolution of the conceptual nature and theoretical foundation of open source software?(3)What are the mainstream research theories and their evolution?This paper adopts the bibliometric research method.In terms of data collection,papers from the Web of Science data-base from January 1,1999 to December 31,2022 were selected,and 138 analysis samples were finally confirmed after title,top journal,conference,research field search and manual review.In terms of data analysis,CiteSpace software is used to car-ry out qualitative and quantitative data analysis.The research finds that,as for the first sub-research question:the management community's attention to open source software fluctuates somewhat,but generally maintains a certain research heat.The United States holds the absolute right to speak in research,while China lags far behind,with universities such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology,University of Georgia,and Carnegie Mellon University maintaining their leading positions.In terms of journal Research,authoritative management journals such as Research Policy and Management Science pay more attention to open source trends,while von Krogh Georg and von Hippel E.The research pioneer has made outstanding contributions and led the research frontier.As for the second sub-research question,it can be found that the essence of open source software lies in innovation coopera-tion,which is based on the theoretical foundation of organizational perspective and innovation perspective.Among them,the organizational perspective is based on resource view,transaction cost theory and institutionalism,and the innovation per-spective has experienced distributed innovation,open innovation and complementary innovation.As for the third sub-re-search question,cooperation and competition are the two main research perspectives.From the perspective of cooperation,existing researches have analyzed the economic motivation,social motivation and technological motivation of cooperation between developers and enterprises from qualitative and quantitative perspectives.With the expansion of cooperation scope,it has experienced the stages of spontaneous governance,internal governance and external governance,especially the exter-nal governance at this stage,and the participation of foundations,companies and corporate derivative communities has made governance more complicated.In the analysis of factors affecting governance,it is found that the formal degree of gover-nance,governance resources,and developer decision-making process will affect the cooperation effect of open source soft-ware.From a competitive perspective,the study found that developers make behavioral decisions based on cost-benefit anal-ysis in competitive situations.With the expansion of the scale of open source software industry,many scholars also pay at-tention to the competition mode between open source software and closed source software,such as market entry competi-tion,business model competition,and technological innovation competition.From the analysis of factors affecting the com-petition,IT can be found that the user's IT skills,network effect,lock-in effect,software industry's own development,license strategy and so on will affect the competition between open source software and closed source software.This paper conducts an in-depth study on the nature and theoretical evolution of open source software innovation co-operation from the perspective of cooperation and competition,and finds the following policy implications:First,strengthen the importance of open source software cooperation governance.Second,promote the creation of benchmark cases of open source cooperative governance.Furthermore,it focuses on the cooperation model between the open source software commu-nity and the foundation.Finally,the competition model between open source software and closed source software is dis-cussed,and the possible policy formulation and effectiveness are explored.At the same time,there are several research direc-tions for reference in the future:First,on the basis of cooperation and competition perspective,continue to extend to the complementary cooperation mechanism.Second,research on the mechanism of open source cooperation for domestic indus-trial software innovation catch-up.Third,research on open source software public science and technology policy in the con-text of China facing the"bottleneck"of key technologies.Fourth,research on operation management based on open source software cooperation and competition.
open source softwarebibliometric analysistheoretical evolution